[theamk]

One of the major benefits of open source is the lack of dependency on the original company. For example if I build a business on MySQL and it is suddenly bought by a commercial company famous for raising prices... it's not a problem, as it is an open source license and I can always switch to a forked version. This applies even if I prefer to pay someone for a hosted version of a database - one provider raises prices or goes out of business, I can switch to a different one with a modest migration effort.

This is very much not a case with Elastic. If you build your business on their cloud offering (and use all the latest APIs), it's a great risk. They increase prices? You have to pay more. They go out of business? sucks to be you. The self-hosting alternative would be very disruptive as you'd urgently need to get operational expertise in running and tuning the services, and that's not a simple thing.

So no, Elastic license is not providing major benefits of open source, and thus one should not call it "open source". It's a single-supplier commercial license. Nothing wrong with this, they wrote the code after all, but one should be aware of it when choosing a storage system.